I’ll certainly wait until it is half off or more. Considering the pre-order bonus factions were essentially identical, I’m going to be cautious about buying faction DLC for this.
There’s no way CA is getting $8 from me after only a week from launch.
The Total War: Attila buyers don’t seem happy about it either.
Empire TW already started with DLC, it has five. 5 DLC.
Shogun 2 TW has 8 DLC, including the “blood pack” DLC.
Rome 2 TW has 11 DLC, the Greek States DLC released the next day, and other two the next month.
Do you see a pattern?
I feel for them. CA is an expensive outfit to run. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to burn quite a few fans to keep the engines running - that’s essentially why Rome 2 was released half baked, they hit their financial and time targets, and it had to go out. AAA games that don’t have some kind of multiplayer based monetization scheme are a dying breed. They’ve got some sort of Total War Battles mobile game in the works that I’m sure they hope will bring in the crazy recurring payments.
As i’ve said, some of my personnel at work are more or less addicted to Clash of Clans, spending upwards of $40 a month on it. For all genuine game makers i’m sure these are dejecting statistics.
Because i’m a giant history nerd i tend to forgive CA their transgressions; i feel like i understand the compromises they are forced to make, and because there really isn’t going to be anything else made if they stop making these games. You’re not getting another game where you can play as the Saxons invading England in a strategy game any time soon, i can promise you.
So basically I love Attila, more than Rome 2, though recently Rome 2 has improved. I’m not sure i’d consider the NPC politics particularly interesting but at least there is stuff going on now. The one thing i do question though is the ruthless beginning of the game. In my Ostrogoth game by about 408 AD the Roman Empire is gone. I mean literally gone, half of it’s provinces razed, a dozen random barbarian factions have spawned and overrun the map, the Huns are beseiging Constantinople after having razed the whole of southeastern Europe, and only maybe one province still held by “Rome”, and the Empire is already a fading memory. Most of the game will now be between these successor kingdoms that have popped up out of nowhere. This is great, and historic and fun, but i wonder if it happens a bit too fast. I’d like to see the Huns stay out of Rome at least until Attila is born, much less later in the game. Right now the early game is a race to survive and plunder the Western Empire from turn 1. Maybe make the Huns the overlords of the Western / Eastern Empire, or give these empires another stack of troops to survive just a bit longer, ect. In a game about the Fall of Rome, Rome falls so quickly that they are quickly forgotten. Getting this pace of ‘narrative historic gameplay’ right is a pretty tall order, but still, Rome just collapses so quickly it doesn’t really have a chance.
As a Roman player, i might want to run to Britain and hole up there, maybe. I don’t think Italy is defendable.
I go back and forth on this. I fired up Rome 2 last night to check out some stuff I thought I may have misremembered, and I forgot how much the family dynasty stuff in Attila seems to add flavor to the game. When I look at the actual game effects between the two, there’s really not much difference. You’re just clicking on portraits of generals and deciding how to level them up, but something about the presentation in Attila makes it seem more impactful than it really is. Just seeing the pictures laid out in a tree diagram instead of a scrolling list puts me more in the moment. I feel like I’m actually manipulating scheming family members, safeguarding my house, and charting the course of my dynasty and not just leveling up an icon. I really wish this could be patched into Rome 2. (I know it won’t, but I can dream.) It’s a nice touch.
On the flipside, I miss the unit flavor text in the encyclopedia. For whatever reason, Attila eschews the cool little write-ups in favor of bland unit stats.
Update coming alongside the DLC launch.
http://wiki.totalwar.com/w/Update
Torches are going away for sieges.
Torching settlement gates has been replaced with the ability to hack them down with melee attacks. This new last-resort feature has been made in response to community feedback, and is an important mechanic to enable the attacking side to still have a chance of besieging a settlement even when their siege engines have been destroyed. The trade-off is that it comes at an extremely high price for the attackers. It’s the pyrrhic act of a desperate general.
One thing that I find extremely interesting in the DLC is this :
Unique narrative event-chain: The Lay Of Ybor
Playing as these factions will present you with a new series of linked narrative events. The Lay Of Ybor is delivered in the style of a Germanic Saga, in which you direct the actions of a fabled hero through a series of branching narrative choices. As the story draws to its conclusion, Ybor himself becomes available as a general for your armies, complete with traits that mirror the choices you made.
This, on top of the narrative that already exists through the Dynasty tree and events, makes me quite happy. While not quite there (yet) I do think that King of the Dragon pass seems like a clear inspiration to them in how they approach this.
Ok. Attila is not horrible but it has issues.
- Beeline for player territories. Diplomacy seems to be borked like always. I have been playing Saxons and trying to recreate the conquest of England. These other German jerks keep raiding my new Saxon island.
This is very annoying because it is very hard to catch the enemies. You attack them but then they retreat out of range. It seems you need two armies/navies to catch anyone that’s at far range.
I am going to try ambushing armies to catch the ai stacks. This will work in the dark forests are of Gaul.
I have no answer for navies thought. I think autotransport armies need to be slower at sea. I have no answer to catch naval fleets thought.
Multiple fleets may be needed as well.
Dominions is linked to tech not army or province size. This is annoying and gamy way to ensure a constant stream of enemies.
I’ll have to play more to see how you “win”. Is the goal just to survive?
Last warning do not spend your kings’s influence. If any noble has higher influence than your king their loyalty drops.
You can see the victory conditions when you start the campaign or during by clicking the objectives button (looks like a trophy). There are multiple tabs, one of them has the different victory conditions. Typically hold a # of provinces including provinces x, y, and z.
Diplomacy wise, I am allied with half the world I know (but fighting the Western Roman Empire, which is hard but not impossible (however it takes a while to start having a decent public order/economy after a migration). My approach was to liberate any liberatable city I conquered. I think diplomacy is feasible indeed,mix you keep attacking the right guys (many penalties from attacking the wrong guys…). I have 6-8 provinces now and find my situation stable enough for the time being…
As for catching armies… They only retreat once, and they don’t gominto water, so I find trapping them easy enough if you are close enough. Constant raiding might require an army and a navy, though (since if they try to escape, when they become a navy they will remain close to the coastlines…)
This feels like it may turn out to be my favorite Total War. My big problem with the series has always been that the very early game is a lot of fun because of the struggle to survive and establish yourself. However, once you’ve done that, the game just becomes tedious to finish a game, especially because the interesting upgrades and city management stuff tends to be at the lower tiers with the upper tiers just being expensive and not terribly worthwhile so there isn’t much of a drive to “level up” and see what cool stuff you have left to play with. Here they’ve found a setting that really stretches out that enjoyable portion of the game, although I’m assuming that won’t actually last for the whole game and at some point it reverts to a classic Total War late game.
I’m still on my first game, and I’m playing as the Eastern Roman Empire(I’ll never not play as the Byzantines first in a game) who theoretically should already be past the point of being fun due to their size. Instead, it’s a battle to hold onto my starting territory. Even now that I’ve finally built up my economy I don’t feel remotely safe. A large part of my military is focused on securing the northern borders in Europe against the various migrating hordes, with the rest scattered on the eastern borders. This leaves the Black Sea coast in Anatolia wide open(Trebizond is the only city I’ve had destroyed), not enough strength in the east to match the Persian threat, and one army for all of my African territories. I finally started feeling like I had secured the Balkans when the Sassanids declared war on me. So I’ve had to rush armies eastward to handle that, likely leaving me open to attack from the Huns. My African legion is rushing to the Middle East to help out there, leaving a huge territory completely unguarded. So again, rather than feeling like the game is on easy mode at this point like a normal Total War game, I’m still trying to avoid losing territories, with no real thought of trying to expand. However, I have been left to wonder if I could spare some forces to move north in the Balkans and grab a couple of cities with the goal of offering them to tribes I’m not at war with. A couple of buffer states would be lovely.
Things I like:
- Really have to focus your limited resources rather than having enough money/armies to just do everything.
- Building upgrades seem more worthwhile than in most of this series.
- I like the sanitation mechanic a lot more than similar things they’ve done in the past.
- There are a lot of nice thematic touches that make this feel a lot different than just a standard European based Total War.
- Greek fire!
- The Roman legacy technologies that you forget over time. I had to prioritize getting an Imperial Library built before I couldn’t remember how anymore.
- The faction I’m playing now will likely play nothing like the various barbarian factions I’ve yet to try.
- I’m very glad they brought skill trees back for characters rather than the system they had in Rome 2.
Things I don’t like:
- Diplomacy does still suck, and I feel like this would be a great setting to need to play the diplomatic game well.
- Why is there no “Get out of my territory or else” option for factions I’m at peace with but who insist on sending threatening looking armies into my territory.
- Still a lot of fairly unexplained mechanics. I can guess what the religious osmosis boost I get from a monastery, but what are the specifics of how that works?
- Similarly, a lot of info can be kind of hard to discover. Mousing over a sea trade route won’t show me what percentage of that income I lose to piracy, I need to mouse over a part of the water that doesn’t have a trade route to get that info.
- Slow speeds.
- AI still sucks. Helped somewhat by the shear mass of factions you are interacting with, but I still feel a little odd winning so many battles that I really shouldn’t have much of a chance at. Granted, I can mentally justify that a bit since my Roman armies should fight better than a barbarian horde.
Diplomacy is just something that I think CA will never do well in these games.
Patch delayed for a week.
Rally Point: http://youtu.be/B6AdSi0RyVA
Edit: Oh wow. They also delayed the Longbeard Pack for a week.
any word on when this patch is coming?
Thursday is the plan. (Subject to change, of course.)
thanks
Nice!
Its pretty funny that the Burgundians are there - Since they are from Bornholm, a quite small island in Denmark.